CollabNet, TCS Partner on System for SOA and Web Services

By John K. Waters

10/31/2005

When Dr. Gautam Shroff met CollabNet cofounder Brian Bellendorf in 2003, Shroff's
company, Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS), was in the market for tools
to help with internal management of its increasingly distributed software development
activities. Neither expected the meeting to turn into a partnership.

"We were putting in place a big program called Enterprise Management for
upgrading our communication, our video conferencing and voice over IP,"
he says. "We were addressing parts of our collaboration needs, but not
in the area where we spend most of our time, which is software development."

TCS is an IT consulting, services and business-process-outsourcing organization
with about 40,000 consultants in 34 countries. Shroff, TCS's VP of technology
programs and head of the company's Technology Innovation Lab, wanted to employ
CollabNet as a framework to enable distributed development, coordinating the
work of more than 400 developers and architects across the company globally.

CollabNet provides a range of collaborative software development solutions
that combine a Web-based software application with a suite of consulting services.
The products are designed to allow software development teams to collaborate
across locations within an enterprise, or to integrate business partners, contractors
or offshore development firms.

“We used CollabNet to support collaboration among developers and architects
at TCS in sort of an open-source process within the enterprise to drive some
degree of reuse of best practices,” Shroff explains. “In that process
we created a framework over the past year and a half of J2EE best practices,
a technical framework for using Web services, workflows and messaging--basically
SOA. We use CollabNet as a platform for driving the collaboration."

When CollabNet introduced CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0 with new application
lifecycle management features, TCS saw it as an opportunity to offer its framework
as a commercial product.

TCS and CollabNet are now jointly marketing a CollabNet-enabled instance of
the TCS framework, a solution called the TCS Global Development Navigator. The
GDN is an Internet-enabled solution based on established TCS J2EE software development
processes, best practices and reusable assets.

Core to the GDN is the new CollabNet Application Lifecycle Manager, which is
designed to enable users to model software methodologies and processes as part
of an overall solution for globally distributed software development. This feature
makes it possible for project managers to select and customize their choice
of process templates.

"With 4.0 we’ve taken the next step," says Mike Kochanik, VP
of alliances at CollabNet, "which is to integrate an ability to manage
and deploy standard delivery processes on top of our tool infrastructure."

TCS GDN comes preconfigured with TCS’ Java Open Architecture framework
and process, so users can employ a process methodology and leverage reusable
assets in addressing their SOA and Web services implementation challenges.

"Software developers have been very successful at Internet-enabling almost
every business process in most of our enterprise organizations, except software
development itself, says Shroff. “Business process change is what drives
software change, and making that into an Internet-enabled application is what
we’re driving at with this first-step offering."